Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Ongoing notes: late June, 2012

The days go on and on and on. Where does it all
go?

We have a letterpress in our basement now (see left), a
750lb Golding Improved Pearl, c. 1897, that the delivery folk left in the
driveway on Monday morning, and I helped the movers slip into the basement
later that afternoon. Well, more precisely, my lovely fiancé, Christine, was
given “on permanent loan” a letterpress from her former employers at Gaspereau
Press that I now happen to also have access to. That’s enough, right? We’ve talked
abstractly about doing a collaborative publishing enterprise for some time,
something entirely different than what we have both been individually doing.

Toronto ON: It’s been many moons since I’ve seen an issue
of BafterC (BookThug, 2012), and this issue, dated May 2012, Vol. 5 No.
1, was guest-edited by Stephen Cain, long a friend to both publisher and press.
BookThug has made some incredible strides over the past couple of years,
somehow picking up all the avant-garde slack that other publishers such as
Coach House Books, ECW Press and Anansi (among others) have let slip away. This
new issue includes an impressive array of new work by Adam Dickinson, Steve
Venright, Clelia Scala, Pearl Pirie, Andy Weaver, Helen White, Marianne
Apostolides, Peter Jaeger and Tim Conley.

The signs were certainly long there, but Toronto poet Andy Weaver has been making some interesting movements further into
language writing over the last little bit. There are more than a few poets that
seem to exist within an odd, nebulous realm that is neither lyric nor language
but both, existing with one foot in either “camp,” and yet belonging to
neither. I think, somehow, of Phil Hall, Judith Fitzgerald, Stan Rogal, Gil
McElroy and even Stephen Cain, often, himself.

dear reader,

a nerd drew an awed werd,

drew a ward nervy and ravened,

revved dawn and yawned a

weary dawn away.

A year yawned and waned,

day wavered anew.

an aery raven weaned an warned

an ever wary deer.

Raw ear and eye

added a wry and rare

yarn. A darned

nerve ended

war, a vender wavered

and averred a dewy, wan

era. Rend a dead warren,

weave a dray, and weave

raw, weedy

There haven’t been many places where I’ve seen
the work of Canadian expat Peter Jaeger in Canadian publications over the past
few years, so I’m pleased to see something new by him, here. Given his decade
or so living and teaching in England, much of his work, when it does appear,
does so over there. But did you know he even has a forthcoming title with
above/ground? The photographer Helen White has two images in this issue, two
photographs of a paper man made out of sentences, written up out of fragments,
depending on your perspective. I wouldn’t mind knowing the whole of the paper
man’s sentence, but sometimes it takes years to know a body long enough to see
even half the writing, there.

And the back cover, much as publisher Jay MillAr
stated at the recent Toronto spring 2012 BookThug launch, includes a bold
statement on the loss of McClelland and Stewart as a Canadian company:

So long M&S, thanks for all the hard work you did to build a
Canadian Identity.

We’ll take it from here.

Minneapolis MN:Brian Teare, publisher of Albion Books, sent me a copy of his recent Paradise Was Typeset
(DoubleCross Press, 2012), produced as the first of their “Poetics of the
Handmade” series. As the back cover writes:

DoubleCross Press’s Poetics of the Handmade series publishes essays by
contemporary hand-bookmakers and writers who engage with the handmade book as
publishers, promoters, or curators. With an eye to the book’s past, the series
seeks to illuminate the forms, connotations, and communities of the handmade
book in the early 21st century micropress culture.

Fascinating to see such a series exist, and I
could certainly recommend some Canadians that should be considered for such –
Jason Dewinetz at Greenboathouse, first and foremost. And then, of course,
derek beaulieu at NO Press, Cameron Anstee at Apt. 9 Press, jwcurry at Room 302
Books and Barry McKinnon at Gorse Press, for example. There are a whole slew of
others, obviously (see my recent article on Canadian small/micro publishers,here). In Paradise Was Typeset, Teare opens with a story of a pilgrimage
he did around 2001 to Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California:

Peter Howard was infamous for simply being difficult, but his particular
grand of playful aggression was neither simple nor difficult for the sake of
difficulty. In the same way that I had entered a store whose interior gave the
appearance of un-interpretable chaos, but was in fact ordered and ultimately
legible, so upon entering into a business transaction with Howard I had entered
a value system whose precepts I would have to learn. Each of my visits
culminated in some version of a Socratic dialogue in which he played an ironic,
punishing Socrates and I a naïve, dim-witted interlocutor. After I’d learned
the lesson he wished to impart, he would size up the books I had found, and
each book would generate an annotation or anecdote of some kind, either about the
author, the press, or its original owner.

The second in the series will be Country
Music, by Nathan Hauke and Kirsten Jorgenson.

Cambridge UK: I somehow came into possession of Reitha Pattison’s SOME FABLES(Cambridge UK: Grasp Press, 2011), a collection
of twenty numbered short poems, sent by someone across the ocean in a generous
package of British small press publications.

I

A reflection: dog dropped meat

into dog and meat and evil were

rewarded in cold fronts on level

markers of repast left in the dish

after lights out; nights strung about

in stern cosmetic aches. Provisions

were got in and some still starved.

Providence is one solid thing, tight

far-off agrarian work ethic another.

I’m fascinated by the graceful simplicity of the
design, the graceful ease of the short yet complex poems writing out a set of
fables both new and achingly familiar. These are fables for the
young-not-young, somehow reminding me of a less twisted and dark version of the
long-late-lamented Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children. If only our
young weren’t so young as to appreciate these the way we do.